School project, not a clue how to use MAX/MSP/Jitter PLEASE READ AND REPLY

Hi, for a class project we have to create a program in Max. My team pretty much left me out to dry on doing it, and I have no clue how to use this software. I have a bunch of premade patch things, and 2 days to create it. Hopefully if I get some help from you guys, it won’t take that long.

What I need it to do.

Play a video of rain on a loop with sound.
When my microphone hears a noise above a certain sound level, it plays a thunder sound (maybe with a lightning picture overlaid onto the rain video if thats possible)

What I would LIKE it to do in addition to the above.
Using frame differencing and this patch my teacher gave us called Quadrants, I was hoping that the more movement it registered in the top 2 sections the faster the video would play. Then if it registered a certain amount of movement in the bottom 2 sections, it would play a quick splash sound clip.

The idea is that the people in front of the webcam are interacting with each other and the program, "creating" a storm.

Any input on how to do this would be fantastic, I’m using a trial version of Max 6, an Imac with an iSight camera. If you can help and need any other information, please respond and I’ll get it to you ASAP.

jit.qt.movie for the video
snapshot~ and >~ for detecting audio threshold. If above threshold, sfplay~ your thunder sound. if you want overlaid lightning, use a second jit.qt.movie and combine them with jit.xfade.

changing video speed: "rate" message to jit.qt.movie. If you have this "Quadrants" patch already, take its output and use it to change the rate. Same for the bottom quadrants, if it goes past a threshold, play your splash sound.

look to the [scale] object to get the parameters right when taking one type of numerical data and converting it to a different one, where the range needs to be different (i.e.: if you get "300" for an X-position, you probably don’t want to set the movie rate to 300, but more like 2.5 perhaps. Experiment…)

note: jit.qt.movie playing backwards is possible but the sound will be weird at best and cause playback problems at worst, at least I remember it doing this. So if you want to change the speed a lot, use a movie clip without sound, then play a sound file separately.